Sometimes God Hides

 

‘Do I look on blindly and say I see the way?’

 

From ‘Close to the Edge’ by Yes (from the Album ‘Close to the Edge’)

 

 

As is well known to my friends, I am a great admirer or the rock band King Crimson and their guitarist (and only original and constant member) Robert Fripp. One of Fripp’s solo pieces is entitled ‘Sometimes God Hides’. When I first came across it, I was a bit unsure of the title. From my perspective as a Christian, I was thinking that surely God is in the business of revealing himself and not hiding himself.

 

But then, consider these words from Isaiah 45 vs 15; ‘Truly you are a God who hides himself’.

 

Hmm…

 

Sometimes when we are most desperate to see God, feel God, welcome God’s ‘intervention’, have God answer our prayers, God can indeed seem very hidden indeed. Distant, or even absent, and often silent.

 

Distant.

 

Absent.

 

Silent.

 

I have said before in sermons that there are so many incidents in Scripture in general and in the Gospels in particular where God is absent. This warrants further study! But that must wait for the moment.

 

Is God hiding?

 

Part of the reflections appropriate to this season of Advent involve us asking about our waiting for God to fulfil his promises, our longing for the light to fully come and dispel the darkness, our hope that our prayers might at last be answered, and so on.

 

Is this God hiding?

 

If so, why? What does it mean for us?

 

Or do we just not see him?

 

I have some thoughts and some ideas about that, but a blog post is probably not the place to get into all of this.

 

However, I suspect that many people of faith will have known times when at the very least it seemed that God was hiding.

 

And it occurs to me that even as God revealed himself in the birth of Jesus, it was extremely low key and somewhat incognito. Bethlehem? A stable (or perhaps a ‘spare room’)? A manger?

 

A hidden revelation?

 

And then the flight of the refugee family to Egypt… into ‘hiding’.

 

So, all worthy of some thought and some reflection, I reckon.

 

The hiding God.

 

And, when, at the Wedding at Cana of Galilee, Jesus told his mother ‘my time has not yet come’, does that perhaps give us another wee clue into this whole mystery of the God who sometimes hides?